Radical Hope Read online

  A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, MAY 2017

  Compilation copyright © 2017 by Carolina De Robertis

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This page constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525435136

  Ebook ISBN 9780525435143

  Cover design by Ben Wiseman

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  A SYMPHONY OF VOICES

  Carolina De Robertis

  RADICAL HOPE

  Junot Díaz

  Roots

  DEAR MAMA HARRIET

  Alicia Garza

  THE LANTERN

  Roxana Robinson

  DEAR HENRY

  Lisa See

  NOT A MOMENT BUT A MOVEMENT

  Jewelle Gomez

  A LETTER TO MY SON

  Hari Kunzru

  DREAMS FROM OUR FATHER

  Faith Adiele

  AMERICA

  Parnaz Foroutan

  DEAR CHEBON

  Chip Livingston

  Branches

  HUMAN RIGHTS IS THE HANDHOLD, PASS IT ON

  Mohja Kahf

  YOU

  Achy Obejas

  A TIME TO DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE

  Viet Thanh Nguyen

  A “HOLLA” FROM THE WEST SIDE

  Cherríe Moraga

  WHAT I MEAN

  Kate Schatz

  DEAR MR. ROELL

  Boris Fishman

  WHILE YOU ARE STANDING

  Karen Joy Fowler

  TO THE WOMAN STANDING IN LINE AT THE STORE,

  Elmaz Abinader

  DEAR MILLENIALS

  Aya de León

  IS THERE NO HOPE?

  Jane Smiley

  GRACE AND KARMA UNDER ORANGE CAESAR

  Luis Alberto Urrea

  #FUCKFASCISM #FUCKTHEPATRIARCHY

  Mona Eltahawy

  THE FEAR AND THE RESISTANCE

  Jeff Chang

  Seeds

  A LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER

  Claire Messud

  THE MOST IMPORTANT ACT OF RESISTANCE

  Meredith Russo

  TO MY GODDAUGHTER

  Reyna Grande

  LANGUAGE IS HOW YOU WILL MAKE YOURSELF

  Katie Kitamura

  YOU ARE MY KIND

  iO Tillett Wright

  ZENAIDA

  Francisco Goldman

  STAY OPEN

  Celeste Ng

  RAMBLING THOUGHTS FOR ROSCOE

  Peter Orner

  QUERIDÍSIMA PALOMITA: A LETTER TO MY GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT GRANDDAUGHTER

  Cristina García

  Postscript

  SIGNS FROM THE WOMEN’S MARCH

  Carolina De Robertis

  Acknowledgments

  About the Contributors

  Permissions

  About the Editor

  This is precisely the time when artists go to work….

  We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

  —TONI MORRISON, “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” The Nation, March 23, 2015

  A SYMPHONY OF VOICES

  Carolina De Robertis

  Dear Reader,

  Three days after the 2016 election, I sat at my writing desk overwhelmed by grief. I was not alone. Like many people (like you, perhaps), I’d had trouble sleeping, and had already engaged in many conversations—with friends and family, students and colleagues, in person and on social media—about the spike in hate crimes, the pain and outrage, the devastation to come.

  In my grief, I thought about many things. I thought about all the hard-won civil rights gains of the past fifty years, now under a new level of threat. I thought about the many communities—including immigrants, people of color, gay and transgender people, women, Muslims, Jews, progressives from all walks of life—now bracing themselves (or ourselves, for I belong to some of those groups) for an era of increased vulnerability. I thought about climate change. The Supreme Court. Democracy. Other nations, affected, watching. The future near and far.

  I thought about a friend’s daughter, age seven, Black, born in the USA, who said she was scared that Trump would make her family leave the country. And another friend’s son, age four, who has two mothers, just as my children do; he asked whether their family would be torn apart.

  I thought about my son, who was born days after Obama was first inaugurated, and had therefore always lived in a nation in which someone like him—Black and multiracial, child of an immigrant—could be president. For months, my son had been talking about using his kung fu skills to defend his Mexican friends from Trump and his wall. On November 9, he did not want to get out of bed for school, because, he said, he refused to set foot in a nation where Trump was president. It was not an act of fear; it was a boycott.

  I thought about my four-year-old daughter’s words about Trump, spoken out of the blue: “We’re not beautiful to him. Nobody told me that. It’s just a feeling I have.”

  I also thought about my grandmother, a poet and activist in Uruguay who died during the dictatorship. Born in Argentina, exiled under President Juan Perón (who, it must be pointed out, was not a dictator but a democratically elected authoritarian), she found refuge in the calm little nation of Uruguay, only to later watch both her native and adopted countries fall prey to military coups and reigns of terror, imprisonment, disappearances, and torture. Her later, unpublished poems, found in her house after she died, speak to the depths of her sorrow. She never had the chance to see those dictatorships lift. I wondered how she’d managed to get through each day, to stay alive inside, to keep fighting in the face of repression, to keep the faith, to take the long view. And I wondered about hope. Had she been able to retain any hope? Could she ever have imagined that, years later, in 2010, two of the brutally tortured political prisoners of the Uruguayan dictatorship would rise up to become the beloved president and First Lady of the nation? That José Mujica and Lucía Topolansky would preside over an era of unprecedented renewal and progressive change? In the thick of the bleak times, how could she have imagined such a future? How could she have imagined that the seeds of a bright future lay right there in the horrific times themselves? If I could go back in time to reach her, what would I say, and what would she, reaching forward toward me where I sat at my writing desk, have to say to me?

  I thought about you that morning, though I may not know you personally. I thought about the long journey ahead for you and for me and for all of us, and I wondered what we would do—what we could do, what we must do—to get through these times as intact as possible, keeping sight of the long view, striving to stay sane, awake, engaged, and steadfast in the face of backlash and threats to the communities and values and democracy we hold dear.

  With all of that in mind, I started reaching out to writers to ask them to join me in what at first was a rather strange and nebulous concept: a collection of love letters in response to these political times.

  —

  Why love letters?

  The epistolary essay, or essay in letter form, has unique powers. A potent example, one that inspired this book, lies in the great James Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook—Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,” published in The Fire Next Time in 1963 (the same year Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., penned another seminal and brilliant epistolary essay, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”). Baldwin’s letter is addressed to his young nephew, and it gives voice to the injustices of institutional racism, the beauty and dignity of Black life, and the need for social change. The tone is at once tender and analytical, impassioned and nuanced, sweeping and deeply personal. Baldwin showed us that letter-essays, as a form, are perfectly situated to blend incisive political thought with intimate reflections, to fold them into a single embrace.

  And that’s where the love comes in. Love is the blending agent that fuses the political and the intimate, providing urgency to one and context to the other. In a letter, the thoughts at hand are undergirded by the need to connect with the intended recipient—and this spirit of extension beyond oneself can link social themes to our personal spheres, to what cuts the closest and matters most. It is love that pushes us to face the journey toward justice without flinching, love that impels us to keep going on the long, hard road, love that provides the moral compass and the map.

  As for the word dissent, it entered this project as an expression of how these letters defend truth in the face of repression. As my exiled grandmother could have told you, it doesn’t take a dictator to create an atmosphere of fear and shut down freedom of speech. All it takes is a bully at the helm, using threats and intimidation against any journalist (or former Miss Universe, or Hamilton actor, or ordinary citizen) to raise the specter of silence and censorship. And so, in such a climate, we can either silence ourselves and live in fear or we can stand ever taller and speak. Dissent is verbal resistance. It is the affirmation of our voices, of our worth. It is, in a democracy, a fundamental right. And, in fact, dis
sent is not unrelated to love. They are complementary forces. In a climate where bigotry is an explicit value of those in institutional power, speaking love is an act of dissent.

  —

  The responses to my call for letters stunned me—with their generosity, their depth, their keen insights and raw sense of urgency. I could not be more moved or humbled by the authors whose words are gathered here: They are leading novelists, journalists, poets, activists, and political thinkers. They are a collective mirror of precisely what makes this society strong and beautiful. They are members of diverse communities with roots all over the world—hailing from Syria, Lebanon, Mexico, Cuba, Nigeria, China, Japan, Egypt, India, Puerto Rico, Iran, Guatemala, indigenous North America, Russia, and various parts of Europe and Africa—and they all claim the United States as home. They are neighbors and activists, professors and artists, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, straight and gay and transgender. They are Jews and Muslims, Christians and Buddhists, atheists and people undeclared in their spirituality. Above all, they are concerned citizens and community members who care deeply about their country and are compelled to offer their voices in the service of justice, courage, and radical hope.

  Each in their own way, these brave, bold writers take the measure of what’s been lost with this shift in our society, what’s changed and what hasn’t, where we are now, and what this means for the road forward on both intimate and societal levels. Among other topics, they explore the struggles, triumphs, and migrations that have shaped their lives and the fabric of this nation; the will to go on when one is depleted or discouraged; the profound lessons to be drawn from ancestors who taught ingenuity in the face of poverty, or spoke out powerfully against slavery, or kept the indigenous ways of the land; what could or should happen next for progressives or for the Democratic Party; the political battles ahead; the quiet inner battles for hope and resilience that form the unsung heart of any movement for a better world; the forces that keep us connected; daring visions for future generations, and road maps for bringing them to birth; the inner sources of fuel that spur us on to work and dream and plan and write and read and speak and care and shape our world as best we can, despite the challenges, for ourselves, for each other, for those yet to come.

  There will be many books written about the Trump era from a single author’s point of view, and there’s no question that many of those books will be invaluable. I look forward to reading and learning from them. At the same time, it’s my belief that the challenges of this era also call for a multivocal response, as there are truths about this moment that can only be fully expressed through the prismatic proliferation of voices. In other words, no soloist can fully capture the music of our times; we also need symphonies. Because there are many truths, many ways of knowing, many perspectives from which these times are experienced, and it is precisely this dazzling range that gives our voices power and makes our coalition, still, unstoppably, an ascendant majority in this country and the world.

  —

  I have arranged these letters and essays into a loosely woven narrative arc, divided into three parts: “Roots” explores the histories that bring us to this moment, with many letters addressed to ancestors; “Branches” addresses present-day people or communities—a stranger in the supermarket, baby boomers, millennials, white people, artists, the protestors at Standing Rock—and delves into complex questions of our current era; and, finally, “Seeds” looks to the future by speaking to new generations, to sons and daughters, to godchildren, or to imagined children yet to be born, all of them inheritors of what happens now.

  I call these sections loosely woven because, indeed, each essay is a microcosm of thought, a fully formed world, and, therefore, can be read in any order, or as a stand-alone piece in its own right. There’s no one right way to approach this book. The themes in these letters rise and fall with their own rhythm, overlapping and echoing as they will. And this is as it should be. There is no seed without branches, no branch without roots, no growth of new roots without seeds.

  —

  There is great danger in these times. And yet, all is not lost. The future remains unwritten, ours to shape—though it will not be easy. Institutional power has been hijacked by a crew of corrupt, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, blithely incompetent leaders bent on dismantling the very hallmarks of this nation’s democracy. We need to be in a sustained and continuous state of resistance, for as long as it takes, in order to protect our collective rights and the future of the planet. This is hard work. One could easily become exhausted, or paralyzed by despair. That is where this book comes in. There is an antidote to despair to be found in connection, in shared words and thoughts and voices. I invite you to find, in these pages, whatever you most need: a balm, a salve, a rallying cry, a lyrical manifesto, a power source, a mirror, a sanctuary, a hand to hold, a beacon, a torch to light the way.

  It is my hope that the words gathered here will lift you, feed you, shake you awake, offer insight, and help you to feel less alone. They are here for you, a steady refuge. They are full of exquisite courage and profound truths about this moment in the great narrative we call human history, sung in many voices, with the heart as well as the intellect ablaze.

  It’s all here. We’re all here. And we will continue to be here. We are the majority, dear reader, the future is ours, and we are in this together.

  Con mucho amor,

  Carolina

  Oakland, California

  Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, January 16, 2017

  RADICAL HOPE

  Junot Díaz

  Querida Q.:

  I hope that you are feeling, if not precisely better, then at least not so demoralized. On Wednesday, after he won, you reached out to me, seeking advice, solidarity. You wrote, My two little sisters called me weeping this morning. I had nothing to give them. I felt bereft. What now? Keep telling the truth from an ever-shrinking corner? Give up?

  I answered immediately, because you are my hermana, because it hurt me to hear you in such distress. I offered some consoling words, but the truth was I didn’t know what to say. To you, to my godchildren, who all year had been having nightmares that their parents would be deported, to myself.

  I thought about your e-mail all day, Q., and I thought about you during my evening class. My students looked rocked. A few spoke about how frightened and betrayed they felt. Two of them wept. No easy task to take in the fact that half the voters—neighbors, friends, family—were willing to elect, to the nation’s highest office, a toxic misogynist, a racial demagogue who wants to make America great by destroying the civil rights gains of the past fifty years.

  What now? you asked. And that was my students’ question, too. What now? I answered them as poorly as I answered you, I fear. And so I sit here now in the middle of the night, in an attempt to try again.

  So what now? Well, first and foremost, we need to feel. We need to connect courageously with the rejection, the fear, the vulnerability that Trump’s victory has inflicted on us, without turning away or numbing ourselves or lapsing into cynicism. We need to bear witness to what we have lost: our safety, our sense of belonging, our vision of our country. We need to mourn all these injuries fully, so that they do not drag us into despair, so repair will be possible.

  And while we’re doing the hard, necessary work of mourning, we should avail ourselves of the old formations that have seen us through darkness. We organize. We form solidarities. And, yes: we fight. To be heard. To be safe. To be free.

  For those of us who have been in the fight, the prospect of more fighting, after so cruel a setback, will seem impossible. At moments like these, it is easy for even a matatana to feel that she can’t go on. But I believe that, once the shock settles, faith and energy will return. Because let’s be real: we always knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. We have to keep fighting, because otherwise there will be no future—all will be consumed. Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting, against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same. This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone.